Earlier this year, a lifelong friend of mine commented on Facebook that "the Bible is meant to be studied, not read."
Being acutely aware that brevity is not my strength, I felt a bit jealous that she was able to summarize such a profound truth in so few words!
And this month I was reminded of her comment while reading (yes, only reading) the Gospel of Luke.
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The books of the Bible contain many passages that seem odd, counter-intuitive, and headache-inducing when you're reading them in English and wondering exactly what point the author was trying to make to his original audience. Luke 16 offers up a sterling example with the parable of the dishonest manager (or as it is sometimes called, with a dash more poetry, the parable of the unjust steward).
If you're not familiar with the parable, the gist is that a rich man is told that a manager who works for him is "wasting his possessions," so he fires him and tells him to "turn in the account of your management." With unemployment looming and him being too weak "to dig" and too proud "to beg," the manager devises a scheme to get into people's good graces so that they might "receive" him in his hour of need -- specifically, he conspires with each of his master's debtors and cooks the books to make it appear that they owe far less than they really do.
As stories go, that is straightforward. But some of the words Jesus speaks immediately after telling it are puzzling, starting with his statement that "the master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness." While that makes sense from the perspective of grudging admiration, it seems more than a little strange to hear Jesus talk about a "dishonest manager" being "commended" for a specific dishonesty and not talk about him suffering any consequences for it.
As he continues, he says "I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into eternal dwellings."
Come again? To modern ears, this sounds like the savior of the world is telling us to engage in underhanded behavior in order to be rewarded in Heaven. But if you are even modestly familiar with his overall teachings, you instinctively know he can't be telling us that. So what gives?
It could be that "unrighteous wealth" (which is sometimes rendered as "worldly wealth") was a contemporaneous term for any assets that were material rather than spiritual. Since material assets are what get used in human commerce, Jesus might be telling us to use them to create relationships that can be cultivated to seek God and achieve something greater.
Or as explained here, it could be that "unrighteous wealth" (mammona adikia in the original Greek) really was intended to mean assets unfairly obtained -- with Jesus wanting us to make things right by giving those assets away (if possible, to those from whom they were taken) with the understanding that we will be honored with heavenly rewards.
Or, it could be that "unrighteous wealth" was at that time intended to mean something else I haven't thought of.
The thing is, most people have no (or little) experience reading the Bible and little knowledge of actual Christian teaching, so if they were to read this passage they might come away thinking it means the very opposite of what it means -- and you can be confident that opponents of the Christian faith will use this passage to claim that God condones immoral behavior.
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The same gospel serves up another seemingly unclear sequence a bit later, in chapters 22 and 23.
After Jesus is arrested, he gets taken before the Jewish religious leaders and Luke 22:70 tells us: And they all said, "Are you the Son of God, then?" And he said to them, 'You say that I am." To our ears that answer is neither yes nor no... but to their first century Jewish ears it was an unambiguous "yes," so they hauled him off to be tried by Pontius Pilate.
Then Luke 23:3 tells us: And Pilate asked him, "Are you the King of the Jews?" And he answered him, "You have said so." Once again, to our ears Jesus is giving an answer that is neither yes nor no... but to Pilate's first century Roman ears, it was a "no."
So the Jews and Pilate listened to the same approximate phrase coming from the exact same lips and interpreted it oppositely. The "chief priests and scribes" heard it as a confession to a capital crime, whereas Pilate heard it and, according to Luke 23:4, "said to the chief priests and the crowds, 'I find no guilt in this man.'"
Although most Americans know that Jesus's arrest and trial resulted in him being executed, most of them haven't actually read the Gospel of Luke. So if they were to open it up and peruse it for the first time, they would probably think something along the lines of "What? I don't get it, that doesn't make any sense" -- and you can be confident that opponents of the Christian faith will use those verses to claim that biblical stories don't add up.
After reading Luke 23:3, most Americans probably wouldn't spend much time pondering why Pilate interpreted Jesus's words as a non-confession to a crime that doesn't seem to warrant execution anyway. But after reading Luke 22:70, most of them probably would wonder why the religious leaders interpreted Jesus saying "you say that I am" identically to him saying "yes I am."
The answer lies in the fact that Jesus was a rabbi who in Luke 22:70 was speaking to rabbis. Therefore he responded to them in the rabbinic style, by which, according to these pulpit commentaries at biblehub.com, "such an answer (means) the one interrogated accepts as his own affirmation the question put to him in its entirety."
But to learn that you must (gasp!) look outside of the Bible, and this is just one drop in a sea full of examples that require you to look outside of its text to understand what is being communicated inside its text.
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So, yes, the Bible is meant to be studied not read.
And unless you're some kind of prodigy, studying it is going to involve looking beyond its pages.
This is why I think telling people to "read the Bible" is not always good advice.
To be continued...
If you care to read the previous installments in this post, they are here: Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six.
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